Advertising

Definition

Advertising is, according to Jef Richards and Catherine Curran, “a paid, mediated, form of communication from an identifiable source, designed to persuade the reader [listener, or viewer] to take some action, now or in the future.” The term mediated means that some intervening medium like television or a newspaper or the Internet conveys the message from sender to receiver, as opposed to direct “in-person” communication. The term identifiable source distinguishes advertising from anonymous communications, such as those often found in unsolicited e-mail or spam. The action can be buying a product or service, but it also can be directed at voting behavior, or social behavior like recycling, saving money, saving the whales, or preventing abortion.

One aspect of this definition that clearly makes advertising stand apart from most concepts of journalism is the phrase “designed to persuade.” The persuasive purpose of advertising is unambiguous. Further, advertising is distinguished from journalistic content since it is purchased, rather than decided by editorial opinion. Still, the two fields share a long history.

The Evolution of Advertising and Journalism in the United States

U.S. mass media developed a for-profit model funded predominantly by advertising. The result is a symbiotic relationship of media and advertising, whereby people rely on mass media for information and entertainment, and media depend on audiences to attract advertisers. Most media cannot financially survive unless they are able to deliver an audience that advertisers want and are willing to pay to reach.

As a consequence, advertising-supported media equates success with audience delivery. As the editor of Ladies' Home Journal said in 1898, “It is the growth of advertising in this country which, more than any single element, has brought the American magazine to its present enviable position in points of literary, illustrative and mechanical excellence. The American advertiser has made the superior American magazine of today possible” (quoted in Wright). In spite of this dependence on advertisers, and acknowledging that advertisers do have some influence on media content, most news media organizations strive to maintain a separation between advertisers and editorial content.

Advertising, it can be argued, was born of journalism's need for economic support. As a separate business, the modern concept of advertising emerged just over a century and a half ago.

In 1841, while selling ad space for a newspaper in Philadelphia, Volney Palmer realized the profit potential of independently buying and reselling prime newspaper space. Using that concept, he left his job to form the first advertising agency. In 1875, N.W. Ayer became the first agency to charge a commission based on the “net cost of space.” By the end of the nineteenth century, advertising agencies such as J. Walter Thompson and Lord & Thomas (the predecessor to today's DraftFCB agency) began to develop and produce the ads for their clients (the advertisers) as a way of adding value to their media buying operation.

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